Kevin Harvick and crew chief Gil Martin have been through a lot of ups and downs while racing together. Harvick was so frustrated after the 2011 season that he had his longtime crew chief removed from his team.

So maybe they don’t view it as a big deal when Harvick has snapped on the team radio this season, complaining about the team and his car.

With only one top-10 finish entering the Sprint Cup race Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway, Harvick had reason to be frustrated and, at least from the outside, there was reason to think that Harvick’s final season at Richard Childress Racing could be disastrous.

So his victory in the Toyota Owners 400 could mark a significant turning point for Harvick, who has not yet announced his 2014 plans, although team owner Richard Childress confirmed last year that Harvick was leaving to join Stewart-Haas Racing next season.

“All of us were frustrated, not just myself and Gil, but I think everybody on our team,” Harvick said. “You can talk until you're blue in the face that your car is running good. People like you guys look at the results on Monday and the points, and they weren't where we thought we should be. I think a win goes a long ways.

“We have a really busy testing schedule (coming up). … Winning a race, all the things that come with (that), will lead toward guys not being as aggravated to go test and do the things that we have to go do here over the next month.”

Harvick’s decision to move to Stewart-Haas likely was made because in the last few years, SHR has been more competitive. While Tony Stewart won the 2011 championship, Harvick kept coming up short in the Chase. When he finished third in the standings in 2010-2011, he asked for Martin and his crew to be replaced because he felt a move was needed to try to win a championship.

After Harvick’s short stint with replacement crew chief Shane Wilson last year, Martin was back atop Harvick’s pit box by last August.

While he and Martin seemed to make progress last year, winning late in the season at Phoenix, Harvick was 11th in the standings after eight races this season. In the last 10 years, he has been 11th or worse after eight races only three times.

“We've been through a lot,” Harvick said. “I can sense when he's frustrated. He knows when I'm frustrated. It's not something that you take personal. Even on the weekends, you're frustrated (but) by the time you get to Monday, he's working in the shop, you just got to let it go.

“There's nothing you can do about it at that point, so you got to try to make the best out of it for the next week.”

A week earlier at Kansas, Harvick was mad on the radio about poor pit strategy. Even early in the race at Richmond, he said his car was terrible in traffic.

“The frustration is there,” Martin said. “When you have a fast car, we've come down to the end of the races to where it seems like we had cars that could run in the top five, easily in the top 10.

“Some of the decisions I've made at the end of the race thinking it was going to be the right one (weren’t) — this has been one of the most difficult years for making decisions.”

Martin made the right decision at Richmond, giving up second place to pit for fresh tires during a caution period with just four laps remaining. Though other drivers stayed on the track instead of pitting, Harvick charged from seventh to first on the final green-white-checkered restart.

Harvick said there is no time to be mad at each other over the course of the season

“I know everybody makes a big deal out of what you're going to do next year,” Harvick said. “But, man, next year is so far away right now that you're week-to-week.

“What are we working on this week? What track are we going to? What do we do to make it better? You try to do that week after week. You lose track of time. You lose track of everything that's going on because you're so buried in what we do on a week-to-week basis.”

The victory moved Harvick up two spots in the standings to ninth. It turned his postseason prospects around from possibly being on the brink of making the Chase for the Sprint Cup to having a much better chance for either an automatic top-10 bid or earning one of the two wild cards based on wins.

“It doesn't feel like it's any different than any other year has been, other than you know at the end of the year everybody knows what's going on,” Harvick said.

“In the end, we all have big egos and we want to be competitive and we want to win races and do the things that it takes to go out there and fulfill that feel that you like (to get to) Victory Lane.”

Childress hopes for even more.

“We’ve got a great shot of winning that championship this year,” said Childress, who has not won a Cup title since Dale Earnhardt’s last championship in 1994. “We’ve just got to be there at the end of the day.

“They're not easy to win, championships aren't. But that's the one thing I want to accomplish. This could be the year.”